Before I was EFL teacher I was a film maker. We made a lot of video for clients which were put on YouTube. So I am very familiar with the site and it recently occurred to me that there is a little used feature within YouTube could be used to great effect for teaching English, and that is the annotations. YouTube annotations allow you to select a certain part of the video screen to link to another place in YouTube when clicked. Most people use this to drive traffic to their main channel page or to their other videos but it is normally in the context of an advert and it always feels a little like spam when I see it.

The potential for this feature though is massive. With a little creativity it could be used create interactive exercises to help teach and practice English. So I plan to make some videos in this style over the next few weeks to see how they go.

My first attempt is an interactive phonetic chart. The plan was to make a video displaying all of the phonetic symbols and to put an annotation around each one so when it is clicked the user is taken to a part of the video where that sound can be heard. Hopefully it will be a useful tool for students studying English as they will be able to hear the correct pronunciation of words that they see written in the phonetic script as it is in some dictionaries and English teaching books.

Here is the chart.

Next I plan to make some videos that explain the verb ‘to be’ for beginner students, followed by interactive exercises.